He seems angry. Blaming superhero movies for where we are is giving far too much importance to superhero movies. The top ten grossing movies of the 80s were Top Gun (superior fighter jet pilot), Indiana Jones and the last Crusade (fantastic / superheroesque archeologist) , Back to the Future (Time travelling hero who evoked pop culture and whose father ended up writing about a time travelling superhero), Beverly Hills Cop (Superhero style cop Axel Foley), Ghostbusters (Superhero ghost hunters), Raiders of the Lost Ark (Indiana Jones, super archeologist again), Batman (speaks for itself), Empire Strikes Back (literally a continuation of the Hero’s journey), Return of the Jedi (and its sequel), and finally, ET, a literal Alien movie.
Every one of these movies suspends disbelief radically and presents escapist realities. Sometimes to fake Nazi Punching scenarios, sometimes back in time to a time, and some times far, far away. Every one of these movies were escapist. None of them were comedies or slice of lifes. They were all fantastic tales involving superheroic actions by the main character.
You seem misinformed. His own daughter still does comics, his wife was a really important figure of the comics underground scene back in the day, he’s a living comics encyclopedia. He’s passionate, maybe a bit annoyed at having to endlessly repeat his answers to the same questions. I would be, too. What’s the point?
What he has said, time and again, is that comics from the two majors have become an one-trick poney - they HAVE spent the last 20 years churning out endless repetitions of the same 10 or 20 stories for middle class 30+ guys and are seen as a way of shortcutting scripts for Hollywood for Time-Warner and Disney. Those pre-existing conditions he mentioned are about author’s rights. A LOT of the older authors died in poverty thanks to bad contracts. He himself was shafted out of his rights to Watchmen big time.
He’s also right about the fact that the indie kids will adapt faster to post-covid reality. The independent comics industry is thriving while DC just had that big mass layoff this year, despite hero movies being big hits.
Comics used to be cheap, the Internet and hundreds of apps and software and tablets made it relatively cheap for artists to create their own webcomics and self-publish and experiment with new ideas.
Have you ever been interviewed in your life? I have, plenty of times. Even if you can avoid the traps of not answering an annoying question and choose the reporter doing the interview, what ends up in the paper most often barely resembles what you actually said. Interviewees have almost zero control over the end results of interviews, even if you do it by email.
Yes, many times. And they always give me a list of the questions asked, topics covered, and ask whether or not there are any areas to not get into. And there’s ALWAYS another reporter at a competing paper who will be thrilled to hear that you were “misconstrued” by their competitor.
We don’t hear or see that in Alan Moore’s cases, because Alan Moore is the curmudgeon you go to when you want a story that blames everything on how shitty the comics industry is right now. He’s happy with that role, he’s happy doing paid interviews for that role, and he’s probably going to continue it at a decent rate for the rest of his life.
I learned that lesson when I was about 6. I was one of 6 local kids who had been selected to be on the UK version of Child’s Play (the game show, although I think most of us would have preferred to have been on the horror film). The local newspaper interviewed us and misquoted me. I wasn’t happy.
